It got all mixed up when the
investigators who had called the Kurds Mountain Turks named the

Assyrians Semite-Turks
in order to make them Turks

The 45,000 Assyrians who wanted
democracy emigrated from Turkey. Today, there are just 5,000 left

By Jan Pacal

Turkish Daily News / ISTANBUL

Despite the definition used by political leaders of a
"colorful mosaic Turkey," the fading and disappearing of those colors cannot be
hidden any more-and the most blatant example of colors that are about to disappear
altogether are the 45,000 Assyrians out of a total of 50,000 who have emigrated from
Turkey in the last 20 years. The number of Assyrians in Turkey today is about 5,000. This
population is limited to the big cities only because every single once-Assyrian village
has now become a ghost town. The Assyrians have been forced to look for a future outside
Turkey. The villages that were burnt, unequal education, pressures-many problems can be
listed now-all served to push them into searching for a country in which they could live
in a more democratic way. It will be enough to look at recent history without rose-tinted
spectacles to see and judge all these developments in a more objective way.

A Citizen

My Dear Minister, I wonder if Abdullah Ocalan is circumcised or
not? The evidence I am bringing to your attention here implicates a singer. His name is
Coskun Sabah. My dear Minister, I do not know what his real name is, but I know this
person, who earns money by playing his ud to millions of Muslirns, is an Assyrian. I mean
an Armenian... And I want to quote here a part of his song called "Southeast,"
the lyrics and music of which belong to him. This is what the Assyrian says:
Southeast, Southeast / The way of my parents/ I cannot stand this yearning/ I missed
Diyarbakir. "The South East has been the home of Islam for nearly 13 centuries.
Is the missing Sabah mentions in his song a missing of his private life? Or is
the Assyrian the translator of the thousand-year missing of the crusaders? The
DGM (Court) has to open an investigation into this Assyrian, and if necessary, this song
that threatens our integrity should be banned..." This letter, which was sent to the
Interior Minister of the period, Ismet Sezgin, and was also printed in the paper, Zaman,
and continues in the same vein. However, it is not a simple letter, but an instrument to
reveal the threatening approach the Assyrians face, and the owner of the letter, not even
able to distinguish Assyrians from Armenians, uses "Assyrian" as an insult.

Right to asylum for Assyrians

In Turkey, such events do not only stay on paper: villages are
burnt and people tortured. Given the fact that this reality is not hidden, the German
Federal Court, after a resolution passed last year, explained that the Assyrians would be
taken under consideration as a complete group. The reason of this decision was that the
Turkish Government do not pursue the complaints of the Assyrian minority so as not to risk
the loyalty to the state of the "Aghas," local chiefs, the village guards and
Hizbullah in the South East.

Another interesting point was that Germany, which believes that
Kurds can live securely outside the South East, has concluded that the Assyrians are safe
nowhere in the country, and has given them the right to refuge. In addition, it is also
true that emigration is not something new for the Assyrians, as they have

been doing it for the last 20 years. Researchers are generally
agreed that the reason for this emigration

has not been economic, but people have been in the South East...
The conflict has become more violent with the interference of the Kurdistan Workers
Party (PKK), and this has put the Assyrians in a worse situation. Although the Assyrians
have taken no side, they have been submitted to unsolved murders and

pressure. All these things have taken the Assyrians away from the
land that they had been devoted to for 5,000 years. In other words, they have been forced
to seek their future somewhere else-out of this land," Bilge continues.

Bilge draws attention to the fact that the Assyrian population
was about 50,000 in the South East in the 1950s, but this number has by now
decreased to 2,000, with the majority in Midyat and its surrounding villages. With the
majority of Assyrians in Istanbul, the total population for the whole country is about
5,000. According to Yakup Bilge, the Assyrians do not see themselves as a part of the
"Turkish mosaic" anymore. "Whatever the reason is, the Assyrians are living
out their new lives in exile. But even if this color is fading away, it is still
protecting its existence in Turkey. The final disappearance of this color completely
depends on Turkish democracy because the Assyrians have decided not to live in a place
where there is no peace and democracy. And the emigration will go on unless Turkey
provides these two elements," Bilge warns.

A representative of the Orthodox churches, journalist and writer
Isa Karatas, draws attention to another point: "In Turkey only Armenians and Greeks
have the rights of minorities, but although Assyrians are Christian, they cannot benefit
from these rights. "The Assyrians are Christian, but not a minority, and because they
do not have minority rights, they cannot establish their own schools, and as a natural
result cannot provide for the development and learning of their own language. The language
courses opened in the churches have not been able to expand due to various reasons.
Unfortunately, the government cannot stand these kinds of courses and has tried to close
them.

"The most blatant example of the situation was experienced
in the Deyrulzafaran monastery in Mardin. In 1979 the education of religion and language
was banned, and the reason that was given was that the Assyrian children who were being
educated there were joining terrorist organizations. These false claims were also in the
papers.

"Religion classes at school are one of the other problems of
the Assyrians --- as with other minorities. Although this problem doesnt appear to
be important, it is one of the greatest reasons for emigration because these people are
kept away from defending their own religious values. In the official religion classes,
religions other than Islam take only three pages in the course books, and are also not
given within the framework of their own values. While Assyrian parents introduce their
children to the Bible as the book that shows the way to God and the priests as respected
people explaining this way, the ministrys books introduce the Bible as something
that has been destroyed and changed and the priests as the ones who changed it to their
advantage."

Isa Karatas, sums up the results of this situation with the
question "Should Assyrian children try to explain that these claims are untrue, or
should they study their lessons? Some have tried to be silent and accept the situation,
but the emigration has been a continuation of this; and that was the purpose,
anyway."

Majority or Minority?

Karatas, who stales that the problem in Turkey is not that of
being an Assyrian, but of being a Christian, brings forward the problem of religion rather
than the concept of national or ethnic origin.

He also mentions the 39th article of the Lausanne
peace treaty, signed between Turkey and the Allied powers in 1922 and which established
the sovereignty of the Turkish republic. The treaty states that: "Turkish citizens
categorized as minorities will benefit from the same political and social rights as
Muslims. Religious belief and difference of sect cannot inhibit a Turkish citizen from
benefiting from any civil or political rights or being appointed to any official
position."

Karatas, continues. "Today, no member of a minority can be a
policeman or an officer. Assyrians had the rights of the majority and not of the minority,
but to be Christian inhibited them in benefiting from the rights of majorities. The
Assyrians living within Turkeys frontiers still do not have those rights."
Another point Isa Karatas mentions is the media and intelligentsia. He claims that there
are some writers who pretend they know a lot and write as if they knew much, but says that
in one of the books of the Education Ministry, entitled "Fast and sacrifice in Islam
and other religions," writer Tahsir Feyizli declares in the section called "Fast
in the Assyrians" that "The Assyrians have been so influenced by Christians that
they are like a sect of Christianity," showing that this respected person
does not even know that the Assyrians are indeed Christian.

The article entitles "Ahdi-cedid," in the first volume
of the Islamic Encyclopedia, also contains some false claims. One of them is that the
Bible used by the Assyrians does not include two sections. But a more important distortion
is in Professor Mehlika Aktot Kasgarlis book entitled "Turco-Semites in Mardin
and surrounding populations," published by Erciyes University. The professor writes
of the Assyrians: "These Turkish Christians, who accepted our language and traditions
and who do not have the status of a minority, are called Turco-Semites, in consideration
of their origin. Turco-semites are not a different nation from the Turkish nation, and
they even have Turkish characteristics." We should not forget that Kasgarli has also
called Kurds "Mountain Turks," and so follows this new innovation, the
"Turco-Semites."

Burnt and evacuated villages

Karatas revelations of facts and reasons do not seem to
end, but the concrete data underlines once again the reason for emigration. In 1992 the
graveyard of the village of Midyat Bulbuk was bombed, and the reason given was that
possibly it was a place for a secret PKK arms cache.

In another case, a fire which started in the Ogunduk Village
Police station, which was attacked by the PKK on July 21, 1992, led to the village and its
fields and vineyard being burnt, and Sukru Yalin, who was 17, being wounded.

On August 2, 1992 Catalcam village, located in Dargecit, was
attacked. The Assyrian graveyard and houses were destroyed. On January 21, 1993 Izbirak
village located in Midyat was attacked by village guards and Melke, Suleyman, Borsoma and
a woman whose name is unknown were kidnapped. The villagers were forced to be village
guards. The incidents are listed like this, but in the last two years approximately 20
Assyrian villages have been evacuated. Here are some villages names and the provinces
where they were located:

Since 1980, 20 Assyrian girls, including children, have been
kidnapped. Hasine Selege, aged 14, was taken in 1994 from Midyat Mercimekli village; in
March, 1994, Turkan Gulec, was taken from Midyat Altinbas village; Marta Ilik in
September, 1994 from Nusaybin Odabasi village and Lahdo Barinc from Ogunduk village, who
was kidnapped on February 22, 1993 by people claiming they were village guards. She was
set free in return for DM100,000 eight months later.

Priest Melke Tok

The priest of Ogunduk village, Melke Tok, was kidnapped on
January 9, 1994 by people suspected of being Hizbullah supporters: After being buried
alive, he succeeded in escaping. He said he had been put under pressure to change his
religion to Islam.

The arrests and the missing

Heylan Simsek explains how her husband and son, Hamdi and Hikmet
Simsek, disappeared: "On January 13, 1993, my husband and son were arrested by
soldiers. They gathered us in the center of the village. They hung the cross that
signifies our religious beliefs on the neck of the imam of the village, Ibrahim Akil, and
said, "We will kill you all because you are Christian." The brothers Edip and
Ercan Diril Idil, who wanted to go back from Istanbul to the Kumkaya village of Silopi,
got lost somewhere near Cizre. The last news from them was that the road was filled with
mines and the soldiers were not allowing them to pass. If o one has heard from them since.
On June 18, 1994, Hurmuz Diril was arrested and put in prison in the Beytussebab
Attorney-Generalship, where he had gone to question why the Assyrian Keldani village that
had been evacuated by security forces had been burnt. The alderman of the village is still
in prison, his stated crime was that he offered help and was an accomplice to terrorists.

In the face of such pressures the Assyrians of Turkey have
drifted away from the country of their birth to find a new life in lands more accepting of
their faith and identity. Another piece of the mosaic has been chipped away.

Photos:

Photo 1: Assyrian priest, Melke Tok, (in black) and members of
his community having a last look at their homes before leaving their village and Turkey.

Photo 2: "Turco-Semites" or Assyrian Turks? A photo of
a group of Assyrians.

Photo 3: Baptized in Turkey but with a future that is unknown.
Assyrian priests and deacons baptizing a baby.

Photo 4: An Assyrian family in their home. Where will they call
home in the years to come?